Follow this link to a 40 minute interview with Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is a Nobel economics laureate in economics.  He is a professor at Columbia University and the former chief economist at the World Bank. He is the co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

This discussion is in the same vein as the other two items I posted today. In an interview like this, Joseph Stiglitz gets a much better chance to go into some details than Paul Krugman can do in a short column.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s latest column where he criticizes the Obama administration’s non-plan for bailing out the banks.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that I am finding many knowledgeable economists and financiers that are saying similar things.

Here is my fantasy positive spin on what the Obama administration is doing.  They really know what needs to be done, but they are having a hard time selling it politically. They keep proposing ineffective solutions until all the experts demand that they do what the administration wants to do anyway.  Then Obama can come around and say, “I really don’t want to take over the banks, but if you absolutely insist, then I guess I’ll have to do it.”

Follow this link to hear the interview of Simon Johnson on the bank bailout plan.

Simon Johnson helped shape the International Monetary Fund’s response to worldwide financial turmoil as the organization’s economic counselor and director of the research department, a position he held from March 2007 until August 2008.

Now a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Johnson is also the co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, a Web site that chronicles the global economic and financial crisis.

Johnson joins Fresh Air to analyze the bank bailout plan and its alternatives.

In the interview, he discusses other bailouts in history.  Some were successful and some were not. He analyzes the reasons for both success and failure.

I have previously blogged about Simon Johnson in the post Global Crisis Orientation.